There is the same universal enthusiasm for art in America. It might be said that America is determined to admire everything which might possibly be beautiful, of every country, every epoch, and every school. It is true that the most engrossing preoccupation of the Americans is not that of fostering the arts; they must still keep their minds fixed on the conquest of their great continent. But it is also true that, in the moments of leisure, when they can think of something other than business, they fling open, so to speak, their arms to the arts of the whole world. Just as all the styles of architecture can be found in the great buildings of New York, so all the arts which have flourished in the course of centuries in Asia and Europe have been transplanted into the New World. America, I might almost say, wishes to taste and understand all the beauties which the past has created; classical literature as well as contemporary European literature, Italian as well as German music, Greek sculpture as well as the French sculpture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Italian as well as Dutch painting, Japanese decorative art as well as the styles of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth Louis. New York, from this point of view, is a real artistic cosmopolis. If, then, Europe is gradually destroying her ancient culture, and her great traditions, in order to construct railways and factories, to found banks and to initiate commercial enterprises, America, on the other hand, wishes to employ the wealth gained by the intensive exploitation of her vast continent in creating an art and a science. How can we explain this contrast? “The snobbery of a parvenue nation,” it pleases the European, with a shrug of the shoulders, to label it. But anyone with any knowledge of America and much knowledge of human nature will not rest content with so glib an explanation. It is true that, thanks to machinery, to America, and to the idea of liberty and progress, quantity is to-day triumphant in the world. Men wish to enjoy abundance. Can they, however, confine their wish to abundance, to the increase, that is to say, of the quantity of things they possess? Observe a peasant who comes to town, turns artisan, and earns a higher wage. What does he do? Does he buy with his higher wage a second pair of boots, or a second suit in addition to and like the one he wore when he was poor? No. He adopts the town fashions and buys more elegant shoes and clothes, in appearance at least, that is to say, like those worn by the upper classes. In every country of America and Europe, the differences in dress between the upper and lower classes, once so great, are disappearing. And why? Because the people want to dress like the “Swells”; and modern industry spares no trouble to give them at little cost the means of satisfying their ambition. In other words, the workman wants to invest his higher wage in the purchase of finer, or